CISCE to give approximately 25 per cent weightage to 'higher-order thinking questions'

The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) will give approximately 25 per cent weightage to “higher-order thinking questions” from the 2025 examination year, it said in a circular to school principals on Thursday.

These questions target the domains of “application, analysis, evaluation and creativity”, said the council that conducts the ICSE (Class X) and ISC (Class XII) exams.

This year the council gave around 20 per cent weightage to such questions, principals said.

The new approach is more application-based and encourages teachers and children to shift from rote learning to understanding the principles.

The circular said: “From the Examination Year 2025, it is planned that approximately 25 per cent weightage will be given to higher order thinking questions targeting the learning domains of application, analysis, evaluation and creativity.”

The council spoke about the need to prepare students for a “rapidly evolving world by equipping them with essential critical thinking skills”.

The circular said the council has been taking steps
to impart competency-
based education in schools through teacher training and board assessments.

Many schools have in the past couple of years changed the pattern of questions in their internal exams, migrating from rote learning to questions that are likely to make students think critically before they write.

• In ISC economics, teachers covering the chapter “Money” in a school based their questions in an internal exam on a situation many children would be familiar with. One such question:

Q. Rita planned to go on a foreign trip during Pujas but her travel agent advised her to convert her Indian rupees into foreign currency pertaining to the country she was planning to visit. Which function of money has been referred to here?

A. Measure of value

B. Store of value

C. Medium of exchange

D. Standard of deferred payments.

• In another school, the teacher who taught the poem Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka, which is about camouflaged racism, asked ISC English students: If your skin colour is not white, in today’s world how would you be affected by the discrimination based on skin colour?
• In ICSE history, a school asked: A teacher has given her students to write on “East India Association”. Who will the students write about?
  

(a) Jyotiba Phule

(b) Raja Rammohan Roy

(c) Dadabhai Naoroji

(d) Surendranath Banerjee

Teachers said they are having to consciously work towards changing the approach to teaching and preparing questions.

“Now examples from daily life have become the basis of setting questions so the students understand the application of a theory,” said Joeeta Basu, an economics teacher at St Xavier’s Collegiate School.

Several school principals said such questions would take learning beyond the
confines of the syllabus and textbooks.

“Education is not just about gathering information but processing and
applying the knowledge. This is a skill that students would need in higher studies and when they join the workforce,” said Damayanti Mukherjee, principal, Modern High School for Girls.

“The problem-solving ability gets stumped by closed questions. Open-ended and inferential questions enhance the ability to find solutions,” she said.

The council has released banks of “competency-focused (higher-order thinking) practice questions” at the ICSE and ISC levels” in select subjects.

Teachers have been told to develop their own repository of such questions for classroom practice.

The competency-focused practice questions have been developed and reviewed by teams of experienced subject experts and vetted by external reviewers, the circular said.

“Students are encouraged to adopt a critical thinking and problem-solving approach while attempting these higher order questions,” the council said.